The advent of digital signal compression and increased communication bandwidth availability has made possible the realization of custom home entertainment services such as, for example, video-on-demand. In the past, the communications infrastructure provided only for broadcast entertainment. Consequently, in order to enjoy custom entertainment, one was required to purchase or rent entertainment storage devices such as video tapes, audio tapes or compact discs.
It is now possible, however, for a user to establish a point-to-point connection with an entertainment data base to retrieve a work of entertainment, for example, a movie, to view at any time. This provides an advantage over broadcast television of allowing a user to experience entertainment at a user-specified time. An example of such a system, known as a video-on-demand system, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,247,347. According to standard video-on-demand systems, a user specifies a title of a video work, and the video piece is provided to the user from the data base over a virtual circuit connection in a communication network. The term video as used herein in conjunction with the words "signal" or "work" refers to either video alone or video with accompanying audio. In contrast, the use of the term audio refers to solely audio.
Broadcast video, such as an ordinary television broadcast, as opposed to video-on-demand, offers the advantage of providing ongoing, varied entertainment. For example, a television station may offer a broadcast schedule consisting of a mix of news programs, game shows, situation comedies and movies over the course of an evening. Broadcast entertainment allows users to enjoy ongoing entertainment without requiring the user to specify each title.
As a result, the entertainment consumer may presently select to receive either ongoing and varied entertainment through broadcast transmissions or custom, discrete entertainment video-on-demand technology.
Similarly, the concept of an analogous audio-on-demand system is plainly feasible. Audio-on-demand has not received much attention, however, perhaps because of the perception that the time required to select a particular musical work, which in current popular music typically has a five minute or less duration, does not justify such capability. An audio-on-demand system similar to the video-on-demand system may also have less of a market because consumers are more likely to purchase a desired musical piece than they would a video work. Consumers purchase musical works with the expectation of listening to the musical piece at a far higher repetition rate than they would a video recording. As a result, the combination of the time and effort required for using audio-on-demand and the popularity of purchasing musical recordings presently renders audio-on-demand less desirable than video-on-demand.
Furthermore, as in the case of video, consumers also have the option of listening to broadcast audio which provides varied and ongoing audio entertainment. Broadcast audio eliminates the inconvenience of constantly choosing new audio works. Moreover, home musical playback equipment can also offer limited ongoing and varied audio entertainment, such as a compact disc player with a multiple disc magazine. The drawback of such systems is that the consumer is nevertheless limited to selections from his or her own collection.